By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

Growing up as a little girl on a farm in Arkansas, Gena Lovett, now Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, knew instinctively that she belonged on Wall Street. There was something about the ringing of the opening bell each day on the morning news that left a lasting impact and kept her dreaming of a high-powered career in New York City. Lovett’s mother, Beulah Lovett, the most influential person in her life, worked herself to the bone and dedicated her life to ensuring that she and her three siblings were taken care of after their father died when Lovett was just ten-years-old. Despite being a single, widowed, working mom, Lovett’s mother was able to keep her children on the straight and narrow after they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. Eventually all four children would graduate from college, Lovett herself receiving a B.A. in Business Administration from Philander Smith College.

Fast forward just over twenty years later and Lovett has served on numerous boards, accrued years of financial services experience, developed a wide range of expertise managing front, middle, and back office operations, and currently finds herself in the esteemed position of being the first Black American Principal and COO at Alexandra Investment Management, an alternative investment advisor managing assets of approximately $500 million. As if that didn’t keep her busy enough, Lovett is also acting President of the New York Junior League (NYJL), an organization of 3,000 women volunteers who work to address some of the city’s most critical issues through volunteer services. Each member of the organization is dedicated to working just as hard as Lovett does, as 85 percent of the volunteers have full-time jobs and contribute more than 250,000 service hours.

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By Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)

When Mara Topping, a partner in the D.C. office of White & Case, was a young girl, she lived in five countries on three continents, moving wherever her father, a high ranking USAID official, was stationed. Her childhood abroad—and her experiences with the beauty, diversity and poverty in Africa in particular—triggered a lifelong interest in other cultures and in international development. She applies this passion to her role as the head of the fund formation practice in the D.C. office of White & Case. “Emerging markets are a good part of the focus of the work that I do in private equity fund formation. I feel very good about seeing foreign capital mobilized into emerging markets where there is tremendous economic opportunity and a great deal of need.”

But the road to fund formation was not a direct one—Topping originally pursued a career in archeology. “Between Rome and Tunisia where I lived when I was younger, there are some of the best classical Roman sites in the world. It would have been hard for me not to be an archeologist. The experience of living in different cultures and the cultural diversity and issues of international development and social and cultural change were what I grew up with. And that’s what archeology really is—looking at long term cultural change and how societies develop and why.”

She completed her undergraduate archeology degree at Cornell University and a Master’s degree at the prestigious Institute of Archeology at the University of London. Topping went on to earn a Ph.D. in archeology from the University of Chicago, using two of the three Fulbright Scholarships she’d been awarded to do her Ph.D fieldwork in the Fiji Islands. There, she excavated one of only two known large pre-historic South Pacific ocean-going vessels.

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